Category: WWII

Flagging Fathers.

Like Million Dollar Baby (and screenwriter Paul Haggis’ (sigh) Academy-Award-winning Crash), Clint Eastwood’s Flags of our Fathers is, alas, an egregious schmaltzfest, padded to the brim with shallow, one-note characters and ridiculous sentimentalizing. I said of Crash that it “mighta been the most daring movie of 1991,” and Flags has that same sense about it. At best, its attempt to demythologize WWII by making the Battle of Iwo Jima a bleak, desaturated deathscape feels like a retread of Saving Private Ryan, The Thin Red Line, and various other, better films. At worst, Flags of our Fathers subverts its own enterprise by trafficking in blatantly over-the-top symbolism, making the battle close to incomprehensible, and wallowing in “Greatest Generation” kitsch like it’s going out of style (which, pretty clearly, it isn’t.)

As its conceit, the film follows the six soldiers pictured in the famous photograph of the Iwo Jima flag-raising, of which only three made it out alive: John “Doc” Bradley (Ryan Phillipe, better than usual), Rene Gagnon (Jesse Bradford), and Ira Hayes (Adam Beach, also very good). As it turns out, surviving hell on earth was only the first of their trials: Once the federal agitprop powers-that-be figure out what a spectacular image they’ve stumbled upon, these three soldiers — who in fact were putting up the second flag of the day — are forced into a whirlwind publicity tour across the United States to drum up support for war bonds. For Gagnon (and his ridiculously golddiggerish fiancee), this is an unexpected stroke of luck. For Bradley, this is grist for several artfully timed flashbacks of the actual battle. And for Hayes, a Pima Indian forced to confront not only the twin demons of racism and alcoholism but also his own feelings of guilt and inadequacy on the road, the war bond schmooze train seems like it might just be worse than the battlefield… (There’s also a framing device involving Bradley’s son (the author of the book) interviewing the participants in the story, but it’s basically Greatest Generation filler.)

Between the battle itself and the opportunity for trenchant social criticism offered by the war bond tour, this may sound like it has all the makings for a quality film. And, to their credit, the players all acquit themselves decently, with lots of good character actors (say, Robert Patrick, Harve Presnell, and look for Luther of The Warriors (David Patrick Kelly) in a cameo as Harry Truman) around to leaven the likes of grunts Paul Walker and Jamie Bell. That being said, virtually every character in Flags comes across as shallow and inert: From start to finish, Bradley’s a polite, well-meaning cipher, Gagnon a boyish opportunist, and Hayes a weepy drunk, and they’re the well-rounded ones. Moreover, as Ed Gonzalez of The House Next Door aptly put it, “the stink of Crash hovers over Flags of Our Fathers.” Cheap, reflexive sentiment is the order of the day here, and even scenes that should be powerful — say, Hayes being refused service at a white-only bar, or America learning of the death of FDR over the radio — are ruined by Haggis’s usual brand of in-your-face hokum, baldly sentimentalized and applied as a paste. By the time we’re forced to sit through some deathbed histrionics about daddys and heroes — a scene which would seem to undermine the film’s earlier emphasis on not valorizing war simply for its own sake — I’d pretty much completely checked out of the film. In short, Flags of our Fathers means well, I suppose…but it’s far too saccharine here to do its subject justice, and is basically a long-winded, ill-conceived bore.

Judgement of Nuremberg.

“The Nuremberg trials presupposed something about the human conscience: that moral choice doesn’t take its cues solely from narrow legalisms and technicalities. The new detainee bill takes precisely the opposite stance: Technicality now triumphs over conscience, and even over common sense. The bill introduces the possibility for a new cottage industry: the jurisprudence of pain.” Also at Slate, David J. Luban argues that Dubya’s recent torture bill spells the end of the Nuremberg era, a period when the US worked hard at “codifying genuinely international humanitarian law,” to say nothing of the Great Writ.

Scribbling Adams | Exhuming Neville.

Two recent history-minded links courtesy of the NYT: National Review‘s Richard Brookhiser evaluates the marginalia of John Adams, and Sheryl Gay Stolberg examines the recent revival of Munich among the Bushies (as does the WP‘s Eugene Robinson.)

Sands of Iwo Jima.

A trailer for Clint Eastwood’s forthcoming Iwo Jima double-feature, Flags of our Fathers and Red Sun, Black Sand, is now online.

Special Agent Bimmler?

“The CIA based its decisions about using former SS men or unreconstructed Nazis solely on operational considerations…Hiring these tainted individuals brought little other than operational problems and moral confusion to our government’s intelligence community.” New documents unearthed by UVa historian Timothy Naftali make clear the Cold War-era CIA had no qualms about using former Nazi assets, and even neglected to flush out infamous war criminal Adolf Eichmann from his hiding place in Argentina after being tipped off about his location. For shame.

Plot Foiled.

A quick book bash: I wasn’t going to write about Philip Roth’s The Plot against America, which I read a few weeks ago, until seeing C.S.A tonight crystallized my problems with it. I should say up front that I run hot and cold on Roth — I quite liked Portnoy and American Pastoral, but kinda loathed Goodbye, Columbus. And, while The Plot Against America is getting good reviews all around, I had a strongly adverse reaction to it. For those of you who haven’t heard anything about it, Plot describes an alternate USA in which famed aviator and rabid isolationist Charles Lindbergh defeats FDR in 1940, makes peace with Hitler, and begins a pogrom of sorts against Jewish-Americans, forcibly enrolling Jewish children (including the narrator’s brother) in Americanization programs and, eventually, attempting to relocate Jewish families to the Midwest. As per Roth’s usual m.o., the tale is told from the perspective of a Newark family trying to find their way — not very successfully — amid the deteriorating events.

As alternate histories go, it’s a great idea for a book, and I was really looking forward to seeing what Roth did with it. But, unlike CSA, which clearly showed an attentiveness to both what happened and what might have happened, Roth here has written an alternate history without seeming to give a whit about the history. In short, I found the book stunningly, almost narcissisticly, myopic. One gets the sense from reading Plot that the rift beween Jews and Gentiles in America was not only the most significant but the only ethnic or cultural schism in FDR’s America. This is not to say anti-semitism wasn’t rampant and widespread at the time — Of course it was, as attested by Father Coughlin, Breckinridge Long, and Lindbergh himself, who — in a speech that tarnished his reputation much more than Roth lets on — blamed support for the war on the “large ownership and influence [of Jews] in our motion pictures, our press, our radio, and our Government.” But, in The Plot Against America, no one else seems to even exist besides Jews and (White) Gentiles — To take the two most notable examples, there’s no mention of the fact that Africans-Americans were being lynched in staggering numbers in this period (the only lynching mentioned is that of Leo Frank), or that we actually did intern Japanese-Americans during the war. (As a point of contrast, C.S.A.‘s central thesis is about slavery, but it moves beyond white-black relations to explore, or at least reference, the place of Asians, Latinos, and gay Americans in the new Confederate system.)

This isn’t about tokenism — it’s about doing justice to the people and the history of the period you’re writing about. And, frankly, the history in The Plot Against America strains credulity time and time again. I’ll skip over the final twist so as not to give it away, and because it’s so ridiculously implausible that Roth couldn’t have intended for us to take it seriously. But, even despite that, Lindbergh’s popularity — and the public’s taste for isolationism — by 1940 seem significantly overstated throughout. (To take one example, there is no way that the Solid Democratic South would up and vote GOP that year — With the Civil War only recently out of living memory, the Dems could’ve run a wet paper bag in the South, so long as it wasn’t of the party of Lincoln and didn’t threaten to upset the Jim Crow racial order. That didn’t even begin to change until Strom in ’48.) And, while Walter Winchell plays a large role here in calling out the Nazi-American pact and resulting Jewish pogrom, he seems to be the only public figure in America doing so. Where’s everyone else? It doesn’t make sense.

Finally (and I’ll admit, this really ticked me off), Plot basically commits a character assassination of progressive/isolationist Burton Wheeler of Montana, who here appears as Lindbergh’s Vice-President (or, more to the point, his Cheney — I’m assuming that’s what Roth was getting at.) At a certain point in Plot, we’re supposed to believe that Wheeler — a guy who refused to prosecute alleged dissenters as Montana Attorney General during the hysteria of WWI, helped lead the investigation into the government corruption of Teapot Dome, and turned on FDR because he thought court-packing was an unconstitutional powergrab — is going to, out-of-the-blue, declare martial law and start rounding people up? That makes zero sense, and is, in effect, a slander on a real historical figure. Roth is obviously one of America’s most gifted writers — but, lordy, I thought The Plot Against America needed more research, more attention to historical nuance, and more sense that injustice and suffering in this country has often run along more than one axis of discrimination.

Two Sides to Every Story.

Here’s some interesting news: Clint Eastwood is coming out with two films about the Battle of Iwo Jima simultaneously next year, Flags of our Fathers (the US perspective) and Lamps Before the Wind (from the Japanese viewpoint.) “Typically, Eastwood is not able to articulate fully his rationale for this ambitious enterprise: ‘I don’t know — sometimes you get a feeling about something. You have a premonition that you can get something decent out of it,’ he says. ‘You just have to trust your gut.’” Well, that and your sources.

I’ll see you on the beach.

Also (finally) emerging this evening: The very long-awaited Day of Defeat Source. I haven’t played much in the past year or so, but if DoD-S has managed to merge 1.0‘s already-excellent WWII FPS gameplay with HL2‘s immersive physics and graphics engine as rumored, this could get real ugly. So, DSSG‘ers, other long-time DoD’ers, and Robin Williams, best keep an eye out for the return of Liberty Lad, a freeborn man of the USA.